Random Interactions

My Guide Dog and I step off the bus and walk to the corner, and line up at the bump dots that have taken the place of the curb. I hear the roar of the parallel traffic and tell my dog to cross the street. We glide along straight as an arrow and step back onto the sidewalk. Racer tells me he needs to take a leak. I slip off his harness and we step onto some grass. Right in midstream, a guy from out of nowhere says, “Can I pet your dog?” I explain that it isn’t a good time. We then continue up the block and Racer stops at the next curb and I tell him to take a right. We make the turn and a woman asks, “Do you need to cross that street?” I am a little out of patience and reply a firm, “No!” She is wondering why my dog took me right to the curb but then turned instead of crossing. She doesn’t realize that it is the way he is supposed to make his turns. I don’t have time to give this lady a lesson on guide dog training today. I’ve got to get to the office. The woman continues to follow me and she comes up along my side and says, “That building you are passing is the Immigration Building.” I guess she has taken it upon herself to become my tour guide for SLC. I take this route every day and I’m a block from my office. I tell her that I’m aware of that and I keep walking briskly, hoping she doesn’t follow me to the next intersection because I really don’t want to have to have a talkative shadow all the way to work. Apparently she disappears into thin air because I never hear of her again. Finally we cross the last street in our route and we are 35 seconds from my office when a lady approaches with a barking dog. I stop Racer and tell the woman that we will wait while she passes. I’ve decided from previous experience that it’s better to not walk through the distraction because my dog will not be focused until the other dog is gone. The woman walks by all the while yelling at her dog, “No, no, no!” Racer seemed interested but calm.

Before going blind, before getting a Guide Dog, before taking the bus and becoming more of a pedestrian I never had so many interactions before 8 AM. Sometimes these interactions are amusing, interesting, or scary. Today it was just a little annoying.

Friends

I expected that things in my life would change when I received my first Guide Dog, but it is different than what I imagined. Parts of my life that I never dreamed would change did, and things I expected to change stayed the same. One example of this is friendship. I actually have lost friends since getting my Guide. I don’t fully understand it all but how I see it is that I started standing up for myself since Racer arrived. Some of my friends didn’t know how to accommodate that change in me. I don’t blame them because when you form a friendship you usually fall into roles and continue to carry out those roles because it is comfortable and when something changes, it can be hard to readjust. Also I retreated a bit from friends when my dog was bitten by another dog in a store shortly after he arrived here. I’m not always the best communicator so I am sure I share the blame. I don’t want to dwell on the lost friendships because I have also gained many fulfilling friendships because of Racer. Many of these great people are affiliated with Guide Dogs for the Blind (GDB). Some are people at work that have reached out to me. Some are people living right in my building but we had never connected until we started chatting about our quirky dogs. I have become friends with a lovely woman at our bus stop. It makes our bus route more interesting and fun when Racer & I exit our first bus and head around the corner to catch the second bus, and as we walk I hear a cheery voice call out, “Hey Jenny! How are you? Guess what happened to me last night?" A smile comes over my face and I know that it was totally worth it to get up at 5:30 for the millionth time and trudge out the door to face my fears and continue the routine. I love my friends!  

Cheesecake

Two of my nieces had a slumber party at my place last weekend. Racer was in heaven. He loved having all the attention from the girls. We were overly stuffed from lunch at Cheesecake Factory so the girls got their cheesecake to go and later they fished it out of the refrigerator for a snack as we watched Confessions of a Shopaholic. Racer was staring longingly at my nieces while they sat on the couch eating the sweet sugarness. He knows that I will never give in to give him a taste but he still was holding out hope for the nieces. The girls decided they had worked on the desserts long enough and were going to return it to the refrigerator when the cheesecake slipped from their hand, and luckily was salvaged, although a large dollop landed on the kitchen tile. It was right in view of Racer but he just calmly sat there watching and didn’t even make a move to sneak a taste. What a good boy! Food isn’t his weakness at all. As I’ve said before, his foibles include sniffing bushes and flowers on our path through the neighborhood. He also loves other dogs and stops to wag his tail and watch them on our route.

The girls slept in the living room with Racer while I retreated to my room. Racer usually wakes me at 6:30 on the weekends but this particular day he didn’t come find me until 7:00 am. Hooray an extra 30 minutes! That has never happened. I can’t wait until the next slumber party!